Digital lighting technologies, i.e. illumination based on semiconductor light sources, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), offer a viable alternative to traditional fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lamps. Functional advantages and benefits of LEDs include high energy conversion and optical efficiency, durability, lower operating costs, and many others. Recent advances in LED technology have provided efficient and robust full-spectrum lighting sources that enable a variety of lighting effects in many applications. Some of the fixtures embodying these sources feature a lighting module, including one or more LEDs capable of producing different colors, e.g. red, green, and blue, as well as a processor for independently controlling the output of the LEDs in order to generate a variety of colors and color-changing lighting effects, for example, as discussed in detail in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,016,038 and 6,211,626, incorporated herein by reference.
In lighting systems, such as those that include LED-based light sources, it is desirable to have control over one or more light sources of the lighting system. For example, in a retail environment, it may be desirable to have lighting with certain parameters (e.g., color, illumination intensity, beam width, beam angle) applied to one or more areas of the environment. Direct specification during commissioning of the one or more light sources enables specification of lighting parameters for an environment. However, direct specification may suffer from one or more drawbacks such as lack of ability to fine-tune applied lighting, lack of flexibility for adapting to newly introduced objects and/or relocation of existing objects, and/or lack of tailoring of lighting parameters and/or adjustments to specific objects.
Thus, there is a need in the art to provide methods and apparatus that enable control of one or more properties of light output applied to an object and that optionally overcome one or more drawbacks of existing lighting systems.